AT&T Long Lines Tower KQG38 at Alexander WV

There are a bunch of these still standing in West
Virginia, and I'm currently working to photograph the entire route from
Charleston to Morgantown and the AT&T
International Earth Station in Preston county. The cool thing about
living in West Virginia is that once something is built, it pretty much
never gets taken down because no one cares. In the case of these
towers, they were sold by AT&T when they decommissioned their
terrestrial microwave network, probably some time in the early 2000's,
and are
currently owned by American Tower, which leases space on towers to
wireless service providers like cell carriers, which ironically now
includes AT&T. Most of these towers are in the middle of nowhere,
so they still have all of the original stuff and no active antennas.

You'll notice that these towers are built extremely
well, with heavy gauge crossmembers and a massive concrete foundation,
because AT&T did not mess around. A notable difference from modern
towers is that they have four legs instead of the usual three, and now
that I think about it these might actually be modified electric pylons.

There are two
different types of horn antennas you'll see on these towers. The ones
pictured above were actually made by Western Electric and are called
"Hogg" horns after the guy that invented them. They're basically an
aluminum pyramidal horn antenna capped with a curved reflector. The
keystone shaped aperture is covered with a fabric radome to keep out
weather and debris. The wire grid above them isn't part of the antenna,
it's a shield to keep pieces of ice falling off the tower from hitting
the antennas.

The other type, pictured at right, is a conical horn
capped with a parabolic reflector, manufactured by Gabriel Electronics, which is still around and
still makes great microwave antennas. Unlike the Hogg horns, these have
a circular aperture, but still feature a fabric radome to keep out
debris and weather. I don't know which is older, but if I have to guess
I would say it's the Western Electric horns, which probably date back
to the 50's.

Both types are capable of transmitting both horizontal
and vertical polarizations at the same time, but use a unique feed
system totally different from what is in common use today. Modern
microwave systems use flexible elliptical waveguide, basically a hollow
corrugated thin-wall copper tube, for the run up the tower. Elliptical
waveguide can only carry one polarity, so two runs are needed for a
dual polarization dish, which are combined at the feedhorn of the dish.
Both the Gabriel and Hogg horn antennas accept massive, rigid,
solid-copper-walled WC 281 circular waveguide which has a 71 mm (2.8")
inside diameter with 1/8" thick walls, and can carry both polarities at
the same time. At the base of the tower a complicated stack of filters,
connectors, couplers, and adapters combined multiple frequencies and
polarities for the run up the stack. When they were first installed
they probably had rigid rectangular WR 229
waveguide from the indoor radios out to the bottom of the circular
waveguide stacks for operation at 4 GHz, but were later modified with
WR 159 waveguide for operation at 6 GHz.

As for why so many of these things are still around, it
mostly has to do with size. That railing on the first picture is about
four feet high and looks tiny next
to that antenna. Each one of these is about 15-20 feet high and weighs
as much as a small car. Removing something that size is almost as
expensive as putting it up there in the first place.

Site History and Paths

There are two sets of antennas on this tower. The Hogg
antennas are mounted about halfway up. According to the
incomplete and expired FCC license I found for this site, the lower
set of antennas is pointed at a Bell System central office near
Clarksburg WV (Wolf Summit, call sign KQG37) about 36 miles away. Some
time late in the service life of this
tower a 12' Andrew dish antenna was mounted below the Hogg antennas,
which I think it replaced. It has a separate pair of elliptical
waveguide runs down the tower.
The two Gabriel antennas mounted at the
top of the tower are pointed South, with the South end of this link
being another tower on Point
Mountain Road near Woodzell, WV (Webster Springs, call sign KQG39)
about 20 miles away.
If you go by the license, it looks like it was carrying some traffic up until 2005, with
six, probably 20 MHz wide, channels. As for the data rate, there
probably wasn't one, since as far as I know this system used frequency
modulated analog TDM. I don't know what radios it used, but the
Starpoint radio manufactured by Motorola from 1984 could carry 600
voice circuits on each channel, which would give this station a
capacity of 3,600 voice channels. Theoretically, that's equivalent to
225 Mb/S or 1½ OC3s. The 75dBm EIRP minus the approximately 45dB
gain of the antennas means the transmitter produced one watt.